Stumping with Hugo

November 15, 2008

Here's how to win the hearts and minds of voters, Hugo Chavez style: Disqualify the candidates you don't like. Boost spending on social programs. Promise laborers a six-hour workday. Call campaign workers in the middle of the night -- on live television -- and quiz them about how many doors they've knocked on. Denounce the opposition candidates as "filthy traitors" and "mafioso."

The Venezuelan president isn't up for re-election this year, but his socialist revolution is. Voters will choose 22 governors, 328 mayors and hundreds of state legislators and other local officers in the Nov. 23 regional elections. Chavez supporters hold all but six governorships, and the president is campaigning for 100 percent. But polls show his candidates struggling in several key races.

Chavez already controls the military, the Central Bank and the executive and judicial branches. His supporters hold all but seven legislative seats and the vast majority of municipal offices. He has nationalized the oil, electric, steelmaking and telecommunications industries and would like to be president for life. Voters are starting to balk.

Up until last December's referendum on constitutional reforms, Chavez and his candidates had carried virtually every election since 1998, each more decisively than the last. But the 69 amendments were more than voters could swallow. Chavez was seeking control of currency reserves, power to declare national emergencies at whim, authority to expropriate private property without a court order and an end to term limits. The six-hour workday was included as a sweetener, but the power grab had gone too far. Voters rejected the package.

Determined that his first electoral loss would be his last, Chavez set his sights on the regional elections. Early in the year, his opponents looked likely to make substantial gains in state and municipal races, including one in which Chavez's ex-wife is running for mayor. The president hit the trail to stump for his candidates just as more than 200 opposition candidates were charged with corruption and declared ineligible to run or vote. The Supreme Court -- surprise! -- upheld those actions, though the constitution says candidates can't be disqualified unless convicted.

Meanwhile, Chavez began spending more on the social programs that have endeared him to the nation's poor. He promised to get the six-hour workday and a package of employee benefits through Congress, to the chagrin of business leaders.

How long he can sustain his generosity is an open question. The government gets half its money from oil, but falling prices threaten those subsidies. Profits are expected to drop 20 percent this year, and Chavez was overspending his income even when oil was at $147 a barrel.

For now, though, he enjoys an approval rating of nearly 60 percent, and he's working hard to leverage that popularity.

"On Nov. 23, we are gambling with the future of the revolution, the future of socialism, the future of Venezuela, the future of the revolutionary government," he says, "and also the future of Hugo Chavez."